Mobile technologies
The concept of smart tourism implies that a tourist does not need anything other than a smartphone to travel. In the context of tourism smartphone has a variety of applications: booking tickets and visits, navigating the area, interpreting an unfamiliar language, and so on. One could be overwhelmed with the amount of different applications that are possible to use, but which ones are really useful during one or another trip? In this section, we will provide an overview of some useful smartphone applications for tourists.
Applications (apps) are small programs that are installed on a smartphone from special application stores – Google play for Android smartphones and Appstore for iPhones. Apart from apps made by some stores, travel apps are typically free. These days any business or destination can make their own mobile app and upload it to the application stores. Mobile applications make the life of the traveler much easier and provide a feeling of comfort, safety and awareness. This clearly leads to more conscious travel, and very often results in saving some time and money.
Unfortunately, most tourists do not use 100% of the capabilities of their smartphone while traveling. Smartphone can play a key role in providing tourists with all they need: it can become their guide, translator and a map at the same time. Our smart tourism center recommends tourists to study the destination in advance and find out what useful applications can be installed on a smartphone. It is also wise to learn how to use the universal applications that are given in this section. It is worth saying that these application work almost everywhere in the world.
Why install apps? We have already discussed how useful apps could be. Another advantage of the applications is that they work much faster than websites. Finally, some apps work without an internet connection, which could be very convenient in unfamiliar country.
Warning! Remember that each downloaded application takes up memory in your smartphone. Therefore, it is better to delete unused applications in order not to overload the device’s memory.
